Accreditation agencies have recently come under fire for failing to keep schools accountable. Now the Education Department is looking to change that.

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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speaks at a town hall meeting on September 14, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo: Steve Pope/Getty Images)

The Department of Education announced new transparency measures for college accreditors last week, encouraging the organizations to focus more on student outcomes such as graduation rates.

As part of a series of legislative recommendations, the agency also called on Congress to give it the power to set standards for how accreditors measure student achievement.

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Accreditors are not government agencies but play a critical role in higher education: Colleges must get approval from them in order to gain access to the government’s massive student aid programs. Accreditation is particularly critical for for-profit colleges, which rely on federal funds for much of their income.

“We will not be able to make accreditation do the work it needs to do for students and taxpayers without congress stepping up.”

But accreditors often don’t do much to make sure students are getting a quality education.

“Accreditation organizations are watchdogs that don’t bite,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan during a press briefing about the announcement.

A ProPublica analysis published last week showed that accreditors of for-profit colleges often approve schools where students struggle at remarkably high rates. One accreditor stood out: the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or ACICS. Only a third of students graduate at a typical four-year college accredited by ACICS. That’s the lowest rate of any accreditor. Students at ACICS-accredited colleges also take on more debt and face greater difficulty in re-paying their loans.

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Alongside its proposals, the Education Department released data on student outcomes broken down by accreditation agency. Their data also shows that many ACICS-accredited schools are among the poorest performers in the country.

Under current law, the Education Department can’t do much about accreditors that aren’t holding schools to account.

“We will not be able to make accreditation do the work it needs to do for students and taxpayers without congress stepping up,” said Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell during a press briefing.

A Government Accountability Office report issued last year found that struggling schools are no more likely to be penalized by accreditors than schools with strong student outcomes. This summer, a Wall Street Journal investigation also found that the accreditors of mostly non-profit schools rarely punish failing schools, even those with single-digit graduation rates.

In a Senate hearing this past summer, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren chastised ACICS’ president for accrediting campuses of Corinthian Colleges despite 20 different state investigations into the for-profit chain.

Last week, several senators spoke on the floor of the Senate, faulting accreditors for propping up for-profit colleges despite federal investigations into fraudulent and predatory tactics.

“Accreditation is the key to the castle for accessing this spigot of federal financial aid,” said Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “It’s supposed to signify that a program provides a quality education for its students—too often the accreditation means nothing.”

The Department of Education is scheduled to review ACICS’ accrediting status next year.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica as “Department of Education Demands Greater Accountability From College Accreditors” and is re-published here under a Creative Commons license.

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